Library of Birmingham Library of Birmingham Project Value £188m Status Complete The Library of Birmingham is Britain’s largest public library and the largest regional library in Europe. The £188m building was opened to the public on time and came in £5m below budget. Completed in 2013, the critically acclaimed project won a number of awards including: Project of the Year - National Constructing Excellence Awards 2014, Project of the Year - Construction News Awards 2014 and the Design Innovation and Project of the Year - Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (West Midlands) 2014. This iconic 31,000 square metre new build, houses exhibition gallery space, archives, online facilities, offices and storage over ten floors. An outdoor amphitheatre has been created and provides a performance space for music, drama, poetry reading and storytelling. There are also two outdoor garden terraces and a panoramic viewing gallery at the summit, where visitors can enjoy stunning views of the city from one of its highest points.

Capita was appointed by Birmingham City Council to manage the preparation of the complex business case, before later being selected as both project and cost managers and CDM co-ordinators for the duration of the project. Subsequently, Capita led an international design team competition that resulted in Mecanoo’s architecture being appointed, and an OJEU selection of the delivery contractor, Carillion. Capita’s building services team was novated to provide detailed mechanical and electrical design on the project. The library shares a spacious entrance and foyer, as well as flexible studio theatre seating with the neighboring Birmingham Repertory Theatre (REP). The theatre previously underwent a £3 million remodeling programme and now shares cafe and restaurant facilities with the new library. The REP's workshop and conference facilities were redeveloped into a new 450 seat auditorium where Capita’s engineers provided flexible power systems to complement specialist performance systems and lighting design for the theatre’s production team. Early engagement and close coordination with the Council’s planning, building control, highways, legal and finance departments as well as statutory utilities and other stakeholders was key to ensuring the efficiency and continuity of the process.

Capita supported the client in leading specific working groups and provided an invaluable link between stakeholder groups and the design and construction teams. In terms of environmental achievements, the library achieved a BREEAM Excellent rating. Sustainable design facilities include mixed mode/natural ventilation, ground-source cooling, integrated combined heat and a power energy centre. The library utilises an aquifer ground source system to reduce energy consumption, whereby cold groundwater is pumped up from within the earth and used in the air conditioning system. The water then flows back into the ground via another drilled well. The use of groundwater as a source of renewable energy will lower the library's carbon dioxide emissions. An integral and intriguing part of the library is an Archives and Heritage centre designed to provide close control environmental conditions in accordance with BS5454:2000 ±1°C ± 4% RH along with oxygen depletion fire suppression system for the libraries world renowned collections, including original Shakespeare work. Capita also undertook performance design of the public address and voice evacuation system, which uses the latest distributed amplifier approach that is zoned to fit in with the Council’s aspirations and future plans.

Pride of Birmingham: 42 reasons to be proud of our great city - Birmingham Mail Perrott's Folly, in Edgbaston, one of the city's many influences on Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Share Get Black Country updates directly to your inbox + Subscribe Thank you for subscribing! Could not subscribe, try again laterInvalid Email We have just launched the Pride of Birmingham Awards to celebrate the remarkable people who make a difference to our city. Celebrities from showbiz and sport, rock and pop, film and TV will join host Gaby Roslin as the Birmingham Mail honours heroes from all walks of life at a glittering ceremony at historic Birmingham Town Hall. We want readers to tell us who really is the Pride of Birmingham. Who has made a real difference in your community? It’s up to you to let us know about them by nominating your city hero using this form . Birmingham has plenty of positives to shout about and with the campaign now under way, we thought we would take a look at why we can be proud of the city’s many achievements and claims to fame. So here are 42 reasons to feel proud of Birmingham, as well as a gallery illustrating many of them.

We’ve included a wide selection of things linked to the city - and if you can think of any more that you feel are worth a mention, then let us know in the comments section below. View gallery 1. CITY OF 1,000 TRADES Birmingham has always been a hive of activity and was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, which was set in motion by the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a group of the greatest scientists, inventors and manufacturers of the time who met to exchange ideas and knowledge. By 1791, Birmingham was being hailed as the first manufacturing town in the world, and after it gained city status in 1889, it was named the City of A Thousand Trades because of the huge variety of companies based here. It's also been called the Workshop of The World. It was at the Soho Manufactory - one of the world’s earliest factories - that assembly-line mass production was created by pioneering industrialist Matthew Boulton. Built on Handsworth Heath in 1766, it made a range of goods including buttons and buckles and was home to the first steam-powered mint.

The Soho Mint opened in 1788 and used eight steam-driven machines designed by Boulton to strike up to 84 coins a minute. The Czech composer Antonin Dvorak ((1841-1904) came to Birmingham and said: "I'm here in this immense industrial city where they make excellent knives, scissors, springs, files and goodness knows what else, and, besides these, music too. And how well! It's terrifying how much the people here manage to achieve." 2. ECONOMIC CENTRE Today, figures from Office for National Statistics show that Birmingham is the largest centre in Great Britain for employment in the sectors of public administration, education and health, and (after Leeds) the second largest centre outside London for employment in financial and other business services. Four FTSE100 companies have their HQ in the Birmingham area - the largest concentration of such firms outside London and the South-East. Birmingham's wider metropolitan economy is the second largest in the UK with a GDP (gross domestic product - the value of all goods and services) of £68 billion.

According to the rankings of the Globalization & World Cities Research Network, Birmingham is a beta level city - the third highest ranking in the country after London and Manchester. Birmingham has the highest level of entrepreneurial activity outside London, with more than 16,000 business start-ups registered in 2013. The city is behind only London and Edinburgh for private sector job creation between 2010 and 2013. 3. MORE CANALS THAN VENICE Birmingham has 35 miles of canal compared with the 26 in Venice. And the entire Birmingham Canal Navigations system - a network of waterways connecting Birmingham and the Black Country - has 114 miles of waterways, though that's less than the 174 miles it had at its peak in the 18th century. M ore cubic metres of water flow through Birmingham's canals than any other city in the world. 4. MORE TREES THAN PARIS This is almost certainly true, because Birmingham has "nearly 600 parks and public open open spaces" according to the city council, compared with the 400 in Paris.

Nick Grayson, climate change and sustainability manager at Birmingham City Council, gave a more exact number when he told The Guardian that Birmingham had 571 parks , more than 3,500 hectares of public accessible space, and 250 miles of urban brooks and streams. Birmingham City Council reckons there are six million trees in the city. The 2,400-acre Sutton Park in Sutton Coldfield is the largest urban park in Europe and the largest outside a capital city. 5. GERMAN MARKET Birmingham's annual German market - officially the Frankfurt Christmas Market - is the largest outdoor Christmas market in the country and the biggest outside Germany and Austria. It attracts more than five million visitors, earning £90 million for the city, and is even bigger than the market staged in German capital Berlin. 6. DIVERSITY Birmingham is the most culturally mixed city in the UK, with 33.3 per cent non-white according to 2007 figures, compared with London’s 30.7 per cent. Outside London, Birmingham has the UK's largest Muslim, Sikh and Buddhist communities, the second largest Hindu community and the seventh largest Jewish community.

The city's Sikh celebrations of Vaisakhi are the largest in Europe. 7. CONFERENCES Birmingham is one of the UK’s top conference destinations. According to Core Cities, the National Exhibition Centre Group (which has four venues in Birmingham: the NEC, International Convention Centre, LG Arena and NIA) attracts more than 4 million visitors a year. That's 42 per cent of the UK’s total exhibition trade and major conferences. 8. CLEANEST CITY In March 2007, Birmingham won the Cleanest City Award from the British Cleaning Council after being in the finals on numerous occasions in previous years. The city council says Brum is the largest industrial city to have such a proud record. 9. TELEVISION & RADIO In 1922, Birmingham became the first UK city outside London to have a BBC radio service and in 1949 Birmingham also became the first UK city outside London to have a BBC television service . The city has a long history of television production , with many shows recorded in studios in Birmingham or filmed on location in the city, while others have been produced here but filmed elsewhere.

Among the programmes to come from Birmingham are Doctors, Hustle, Crossroads, Boon, New Faces, Spitting Image, Pot Black and Tiswas, plus the game shows The Golden Shot, Bullseye and Blockbusters. In addition, The Archers, the world’s longest running radio soap, is recorded in Birmingham for BBC Radio 4. 10. ST PATRICK'S PARADE Birmingham's St Patrick's Day Parade is the third biggest in the world, with more than 80,000 people turning out to celebrate the occasion. New York boasts the world’s biggest St Patrick’s Day parade, with 150,000 people marching, while Dublin’s parade takes second position. Birmingham has a large Irish community - dating back to the Industrial Revolution when Irish people moved here to work in construction and factories - and is estimated to have the largest Irish population in the UK. The city has the UK’s only Irish Quarter, centred on Digbeth . 11. MUSIC Birmingham is the birthplace of heavy metal, with Black Sabbath and Judas Priest coming from the city.

Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi - born and raised in Handsworth - shaped the sound when he learned to play guitar in a different way following an industrial accident that removed the tips of two of his fingers. He tuned the guitar down and relied on power chords, something guitarist Terry Butler also did - and together they produced the classic sound of metal. The later metal bands Napalm Death and Godflesh are also from Birmingham. Also from the city are Dave Pegg (Jethro Tull, Fairport Convention), Martin Barre (Jethro Tull), and Blaze Bayley (Wolfsbane). Other music acts from Birmingham include ELO, Duran Duran, UB40, The Moody Blues, Fuzzbox, Ocean Colour Scene, The Move, Toyah Willcox, Joan Armatrading, Dexys Midnight Runners, Ruby Turner, Fine Young Cannibals, The Streets, Musical Youth, Jamelia and Pato Banton.

Mothers club in Erdington High Street was voted the world’s best rock venue in 1969 and 1970, with a blue plaque unveiled in 2013 to commemorate the venue where such stars as Pink Floyd, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Black Sabbath, The Who and Led Zeppelin once played. In the 1960s, Birmingham was the birthplace of modern bhangra and is also the centre of the UK’s Asian music industry. It's the global centre of bhangra music, producing almost 90 per cent of it. In the classical world, Worcestershire-born composer Edward Elgar was the first conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra (later the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra or CBSO) when it was officially founded in November 1920. In 2002, the CBSO won the most prestigious Record of the Year prize at the Gramophone Awards, the classical counterpart to the Oscars. 12. CINEMAS Oscar Deutsch, born in Balsall Heath and the son of a scrap metal dealer, opened the first ever Odeon cinema in Perry Barr in 1930.

He had previously opened a cinema in Brierley Hill, Dudley borough, two years earlier but the Perry Barr cinema was the first under the Odeon brand. Star City now has the UK’s largest cinema complex with 30 screens. Six screens are devoted to Asian films, making this the largest Bollywood movie centre in Europe. The Star City complex also boasts the UK’s largest casino with 40 gaming tables. The Giant Screen cinema at Millennium Point has the largest screen in the Midlands (72ft wide, 40ft high) and the second largest in the UK. And the city's Electric Cinema is the oldest working cinema in the UK. 13. TRANSPORT As well as its famous waterways, Birmingham is home to the Gravelly Hill interchange, better known as Spaghetti Junction and probably the best known motorway junction in the UK. The nickname Spaghetti Junction was coined by journalists on the Birmingham Mail. The M6 passes through Birmingham on the Bromford Viaduct, which at 5,600m is the the longest bridge in the UK.

Birmingham was also the terminus for both of the world's first two long-distance railway lines - the 82-mile Grand Junction Railway of 1837 and the 112-mile London and Birmingham railway of 1838. Birmingham's New Street station is the busiest train station in the UK outside London and a national hub for CrossCounty, the biggest long-distance rail network in Britain. In addition, the Number 11 outer circle bus routes are said to be the longest urban bus routes in Europe, reaching a length of 26 miles. 14. TENNIS Tennis originated in Birmingham when, in 1859, Harry Gem, clerk to the Birmingham Magistrates, and his friend Augurio Perera, a Spanish merchant, combined elements of racquets and the Basque ball game pelota on the lawn of Perera’s home in Edgbaston. The dimensions of the court were identical to those used today but the height of the net was different. The first lawn tennis club was formed in Leamington Spa but not did last long so the oldest surviving club is the Edgbaston Archery and Lawn Tennis Society, which was set up months later in Birmingham. 15.

GAY PRIDE Evolving from the previous Five Days Of Fun programme of entertainment at the city's gay venues, Birmingham Pride has been running for 17 years and is now the biggest two-day UK’s gay festival, boosting the city’s leisure and tourism sector with a £20 million economic impact, There were 75,000 visitors in 2013 and expected to be even more in 2014. 16. TOLKIEN Acclaimed author J.R.R Tolkien spent his childhood in Birmingham (living variously in Kings Heath, Hall Green, Rednal and Edgbaston), with Sarehole Mill, Moseley Bog, Perrott’s Folly, Edgbaston Waterworks tower and the nearby Lickey Hills among the many influences on his famous works Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit. 17. JEWELLERY The Jewellery Quarter is Europe’s largest concentration of jewellery businesses, and produces 40 per cent of the jewellery made in the UK. It has has the largest School of Jewellery in Europe, and the world’s largest Assay Office, which hallmarks about 12 million items a year.

At its height in the early 1900s, the Jewellery Quarter employed more than 30,000 people. About 3,000 people work there today. 18. THEATRE Birmingham Hippodrome is the busiest theatre in the UK with over 520,000 visitors a year generating £15million in ticket sales. It’s also the busiest venue for dance, outside London. 19. FOOD & DRINK Birmingham has four Michelin-starred restaurants, more than any other city in England, outside London. Glynn Purnell, Adam Stokes, Luke Tipping and Richard Turner serve up success for the city’s fine dining. The city is also the birthplace of the balti - a type of curry served in a metal bowl - and home to the Balti Triangle, an area encompassing Sparkbrook, Balsall Heath and Moseley, where there are more than 100 Asian restaurants welcoming tens of thousands of diners every week. Mohammed Ajaib created the balti in Birmingham in 1977.

Well-known food brands that originated in the city include Bird's Custard, Typhoo tea, Cadbury's chocolate and HP Sauce. Alfred Bird created Bird’s custard in 1837 because his wife was allergic to the eggs used to thicken earlier versions of the dessert. In 1863, William Sumner published A Popular Treatise On Tea and in 1870 started a grocery/pharmacy business with his son John in High Street, Birmingham. It was in 1903 that John’s son, John Sumner Jr, created Typhoo tea - taking the name from the Chinese word for doctor - after his sister said she had found relief for her indigestion by drinking a brew made made from the tiniest particles of tea leaf, rather than the usual large leaf variety. Sumner Jr sold the tea pre-packaged rather than loose and Typhoo went on to become one of the largest makers of teabags in the UK. Chocolate giant Cadbury began when John Cadbury opened a grocery shop in Bull Street, Birmingham, in 1824. Among the products, he sold cocoa and drinking chocolate, which he prepared using a pestle and mortar.

It was in 1831 that he started the Cadbury manufacturing business in a warehouse in Crooked Lane. In 1847, it moved into a larger factory in Bridge Street and when that site became too small, a new works was built at Bournville. The company produced its first chocolate bars in 1897 and went on to become what is today the second largest confectionery brand in the world after Wrigley’s. 20. YOUTH/EDUCATION Birmingham is the youngest city in Europe, with under 25s accounting for nearly 40 per cent of its population. Birmingham has five universities (Aston, Birmingham, Birmingham City, Newman and University College Birmingham). The region as a whole produces over 111,000 graduates each year, making it the second largest student area in the UK. In 2011, Birmingham had more than 78,000 students living in the city during term-time, more than any other city in the UK outside London.

In addition, the national educational charity University of the First Age was founded in Birmingham by Professor Tim Brighouse in 1996, and the Birmingham Business School, established in 1902, is the oldest graduate-level business school in the UK. 21. CELEBRITIES As well as the music stars we’ve already mentioned, numerous other famous faces hail from Brum. They include Jasper Carrott, Tony Hancock, David Harewood, Trevor Eve, Martin Shaw, Cat Deeley, Emma Willis, Barbara Cartland, Ian Lavender and Bob Carolgees. 22. MUSEUMS AND ART Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery holds the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite art in the world as well as Europe's top collections of ceramics and fine metalwork. Also on display there is the Staffordshire Hoard, the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever found. It consists of more than 3,500 items, with over 5kg of gold, 1.4kg of silver and 3,500 cloisonné garnets. And the museum also contains the the largest complete bronze sculpture of its kind in the world.

The Sultanganj Buddha was found in the North Indian town of Sultangani during the construction of the East Indian Railway and dates from 700-800 AD. Many mechanical parts of the East Indian Railway were manufactured in Birmingham and the Buddha was offered to the City in 1864.. It remains one of the most valuable objects in the museum’s collection and is the centrepiece of a gallery dedicated to celebrating the heritage of South Asia, where around 20 per cent of the population of Birmingham have their roots, and often has flowers left at its feet from local Buddhist groups. The Barber Institute of Fine Arts has been described as one of the finest small art galleries in the world. Birmingham's science museum, the Thinktank, has the world's oldest working steam engine and the UK's first purpose-built digital planetarium. In addition, The Drum in the Newtown area of Aston is the UK's national centre for Black British and British Asian arts. 23. THE POSTAL SYSTEM/STAMPS Birmingham schoolteacher Rowland Hill established the first modern postal system towards the end of 1839. As part of those reforms, he invented the postage stamp.

The very first stamp was the Penny Black - designed by artist William Mulready and featuring Queen Victoria - which appeared in May 1840. 24. DNA In 1962, the physicist and molecular biologist Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel Prize for his work revealing the structure of DNA as one of the three (the others being James Watson and Francis Crick) who became known as the Code Breakers. Wilkins was brought up in Birmingham and educated at King Edward’s School, going on to develop wartime radar screens at Birmingham University before his involvement in genetics research. Wilkins produced the first clear X-ray images of DNA, which he presented in 1951. He sent a second set of images to Watson and Crick, who began building a DNA model and then Wilkins checked and corrected their work. Wilkins, Crick and Watson were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. The former Forensic Science Service, which was based on Birmingham Business Park in Marston Green, pioneered the use of large-scale DNA profiling and helped to catch Soham killer Ian Huntley and paedophile Roy Whiting. It set up the world’s first DNA database in April 1995.

The service was closed in March 2012 with work now contracted to the private sector. 25. GREEN TARGETS Birmingham has some of the highest environmental targets in Europe, with the city council pledging to reduce carbon emissions in the city by 60 per cent by 2027. This is above the UK Government targets of a 34 per cent reduction by 2022 and an 80 per cent reduction by 2050. 26. LIBRARY The new Library of Birmingham - which is estimated to have cost £188.8 million - is the largest public library in the UK, the largest public cultural space in Europe and the largest regional library in Europe. 27. BANKS & BUILDING SOCIETIES England’s first municipal bank was set up in Birmingham. The Birmingham Corporation Savings Bank - later Birmingham Municipal Bank - was intended to raise money to help the First World War, and opened on September 29, 1916. Midland Bank and Lloyds Bank were also founded in Birmingham.

The world’s first building society - Ketley’s Building Society - was founded in Birmingham in 1775 by Richard Ketley, landlord of the Golden Cross pub. 28. HEALTH & MEDICINE William Withering, a physician at Birmingham General Hospital, discovered the use of digitalis - an extract from the foxglove plant - as a heart drug and in 1785 published a paper on his findings. A member of the Lunar Society of distinguished scientists, he lived at Edgbaston Hall and later in Sparkbrook, where he died in 1799. In Birmingham on January 11, 1896, John Hall-Edwards was first to use X-rays under clinical conditions by taking an X-ray image - or radiograph - of a needle embedded in someone’s hand. On February 14, 1896, he was the first to use X-rays in a surgical operation. He also took the first X-ray of the human spine. Birmingham surgeon Dr Joseph Sampson Gamgee invented the surgical dressing called Gamgee Tissue - cotton wool between two layers of gauze - in 1880.

His name became an inspiration for the hobbit character Sam Gamgee in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Birmingham chemist Thomas Allcock invented the plaster cast in 1854. It was at Birmingham University that Rupert Billingham and Peter Medawar set out the key procedures and principles of skin grafting. They wrote the influential scientific paper The Technique of Free Skin Grafting In Mammals, published in March 1951. Modern medical students still read the paper, which continues to be referenced in modern science and laid the foundation for all types of transplants. In 1950, the first hole-in-the-heart surgery was carried out at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, and in 1960 it was announced that Queen Elizabeth Hospital surgeon Leon Abrams had fitted the first variable-pace pacemaker, which solved the infections and pain caused by earlier versions because it was in a small box outside the body. Abrams also set up one of the UK’s top centres for lung and heart surgery at the hospital and established open-heart surgery on the site. In 1952, a team of researchers in Birmingham made the link between wheat gluten and coeliac disease and developed gluten-free diets.

Among the team was Australian medical researcher Professor Charlotte Anderson, who became Director of the Institute of Child Health at the University of Birmingham from 1968 to 1980. She was the first woman professor of paediatrics in the UK. In 2013, Birmingham charity Cure Leukaemia launched a £1million appeal to fund pioneering drug trials at Birmingham Children's Hospital and Queen Elizabeth Hospital so terminally-ill youngsters get access to potentially life-saving treatments. Schoolgirl and education campaigner Malala Yousafzai was flown from Pakistan to receive treatment at Queen Elizabeth Hospital after being shot in the head by the Taliban. She went on to perform the official opening of the Library of Birmingham in September 2013. 29. FOOTBALL Birmingham businessman William McGregor founded the Football League, the world’s first football league competition. McGregor, who had set up a drapery business in Aston, became involved with the nearby Aston Villa football club. He joined the board of directors and then rose to the position of vice chairman and eventually chairman in 1897.

It was in 1888 that he suggested that 10 or 12 of England’s top clubs get together to arrange fixtures and the Football League was born. Birmingham is where the FA Cup was made. The very first trophy had been produced in Sheffield but was stolen from a display window in Birmingham in 1895 and never recovered; the thief later admitted it was melted down to make counterfeit coins. The second trophy - and the oldest one surviving today - was a replica of the first and made by Vaughtons of Birmingham, which still exists in Well Street. In 1911 the company was asked by the Football League to make its medals - and is still doing so today. It also made the Olympics commemorative medallions in 1908. Birmingham was first to be named National City of Sport by the Sports Council. 30. BLOOMIN' GOOD SHOW Birmingham is bloomin' good, having won a record-breaking 14 consecutive gold medals from the Chelsea Flower Show. In 2014, the city council's display for Chelsea won gold again, for the third year in a row . 31.

INNOVATION Of the 4,000 inventions copyrighted in the UK a year, 2,800 come from the Birmingham area. Peter Colegate of the Patent Office said: "Every year, Birmingham amazes us by coming up with thousands of inventions. It is impossible to explain but people in the area seem to have a remarkable ability to come up with, and have the dedication to produce, ideas." Among the gadgets to come from Birmingham are the photocopier, smoke detector, household vacuum cleaner and mass spectrometer. It was in 1856 that Alexander Parkes created celluloid, the first man-made plastic. In 1920, Charles Henry Foyle invented the folding carton and in 1929, Brylcream was created by County Chemicals at the Chemico Works in Bradford Street, Birmingham. And it was the Birmingham chemist Joseph Priestley who discovered oxygen in August 1774. Birmingham surgeon John Wright experimented with electricity in his spare time and discovered a process for coating metal objects in gold and silver. Wright’s associates George Elkington and Henry Elkington were awarded the first patents for electroplating in 1840.

These two founded the electroplating industry in Birmingham and the technique spread across the world. The world’s first pneumatic tyre was made by Dunlop in Birmingham, in 1888, by John Boyd Dunlop. He sold the rights to Harvey du Cross Jr who founded the Dunlop Rubber Company in 1889. The former tyre manufacturing plant Fort Dunlop - today home to a number of businesses including the Birmingham Mail - was built in 1916 and was at one time the largest factory in the world, employing more than 3,200 people. In 1922, Dunlop invented a tyre that lasted three times longer than any other, and Dunlop tyres have helped many drivers and their cars to victory at the Grand Prix, Le Mans, Formula 1 and British and world speed records. It was Birmingham engineer William Murdoch (sometimes written as Murdock) who discovered the use of gas for lighting. Murdoch had come down to the city from Scotland in 1777, walking the 300 miles on foot, and found work with steam engine manfucturer James Watt.

He lived in Birmingham for much of the rest of his life but also spent time in Cornwall helping maintain the steam engines that pumped water from the tin mines. It was in 1792 that he discovered gas lighting and lit his Cornish residence with gas - this has been claimed to be the first house in the world to have gas lighting, though Archibald Cochrane, ninth Earl of Dundonald, had lit his family estate with gas a few years earlier, in 1789. In 1798, Murdoch used gas to provide internal lighting for Birmingham's Soho Foundry - a factory making steam engines - and in 1802 he lit the outside of the building in a public display that amazed local residents. In 1806, Birmingham inventor Joseph Pemberton lit the outside of his own factory with gas, and this eventually led to the first public street lighting by gas, which was in London in 1807. It was in 1818 that Birmingham had its first street lighting by gas, with the lights made in Gas Street.

The Birmingham and Staffordshire Gas Company, set up in 1825, opened the country’s largest gas works at Swan Village, West Bromwich, in 1829. 32. PENS By the 1850s, Birmingham was a world centre for the pen trade. More than half the steel-nib pens manufactured in the world were made in Birmingham, where thousands of skilled craftsmen and craftswomen were employed in the industry. In 1828, Birmingham manufacturer Josiah Mason developed a cheap, efficient slip-in nib that could be added to a fountain pen. Mason became the largest pen-maker in England and in 1875 he founded Mason Science College, which became the University of Birmingham. Making pens more efficiently and cheaply encouraged the development of education and literacy. 33. PLANES In 1940, just after the start of the Second World War, Castle Bromwich Aircraft Factory started production of the Spitfire fighter plane and became the largest Spitfire factory in the UK, producing up to 320 aircraft per month.

When production ended at Castle Bromwich in June 1945, a total of 12,129 Spitfires had been built - more than half of the 20,000 ever produced. 34. TOURISM Birmingham was named the world's fastest growing Christmas and New Year destination by travel website Expedia, following a 118 per cent increase in festive bookings to the city. In addition, Birmingham beat off competition from London, Liverpool and York when readers of Group Leisure magazine named it Best UK City to visit . Birmingham’s success follows record visitor numbers to the city in 2012, with 33.8 million people contributing £5.1 billion to its local economy, supporting more than 61,000 jobs. In 2012, the New York Times mentioned the city as one of the top 20 international destinations to visit in 2012, while New York Magazine encouraged Americans to choose Birmingham over London for their vacations. 35. WEATHER MAPS Sir Francis Galton, born in Birmingham in 1822 and a half-cousin to Charles Darwin, is credited as the first to apply statistical methods to science.

In doing so, he gave birth to the science of meteorology by creating the first weather map, compiled using data from all of Britain's weather stations in October 1861. From that he noticed that winds travelled clockwise around an area of high pressure, coining the term anticyclone for that effect. He was also the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale. A half-cousin to Charles Darwin, he also devised a method for classifying fingerprints and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities. 36. THE MINI The Mini, an icon of the swinging Sixties, was manufactured at Birmingham’s Longbridge plant from 1959 to 2000. In 1999 the Mini was voted the second most influential car of the 20th century, and in 2014 it was named Britain’s favourite car of all time in a survey by motoring magazine Autocar. By the late 1960s, Longbridge was the biggest car plant in the world and employed around 250,000 workers. And it all started here in Brum.

It was in 1895 in Birmingham that Frederick William Lanchester build the first petrol-driven four-wheeled car in Britain. He also invented the accelerator pedal. Lanchester, who had been working at the Forward Gas Engine Company in Saltley, Birmingham, had first devised an engine that ran on petrol rather than gas. As part of that, he invented the carburettor to get the correct mix of air and fuel. Having tried the new engine in a boat and created Britain's first motorboat, he decided to design a four-wheeled vehicle that would run on petrol. He worked on the car at workshops in Ladywood Road, Fiveways, and then he and his brothers set up a factory in Montgomery Street, Sparkbrook, to make the cars so they could be sold to the public. 37. GUNS Birmingham's Gun Quarter was for many years the centre of the world's gun manufacturing industry. In 1865 nearly 10,000 people were employed in the city's gun industry.

During the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), production soared as more than three million guns were made in the cty, with Birmingham supplying two thirds of the guns used by the British army. 38. BIKES & MOTORBIKES Hercules Cycle and Motor Company, founded in 1910 in Aston, had become the world’s biggest manufacturer of bicycles by the end of the 1930s, when six million had been made. Evolving out of Birmingham’s bicycle industry, firms such as Norton and BSA made Birmingham an international centre for motorbike manufacture. BSA - the Birmingham Small Arms Company - began as a gunmaker founded in Birmingham's Gun Quarter in 1861 before venturing into bicycles, motorbikes and cars. BSA was at one time the largest motorcycle producer in the world and Birmingham bikes won many awards for speed and quality. 39. CUTLERY Birmingham firm Arthur Price was the first company to make spoons and forks from chromium plate, the forerunner of stainless steel. By the 1950s, it became the largest manufacturer of stainless steel cutlery in the country.

In April 1912, A. Price & Co. Ltd, as the company was then known, was based in a small factory at Conybere Street, Birmingham and celebrating its 10th anniversary with a commission to supply premium cutlery for use on the world’s newest and most luxurious ocean liner, the Titanic. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s tragic maiden voyage, Arthur Price recreated the Panel Reed cutlery that was used in the ship’s First Class accommodation. In 1976, the firm was commissioned to design and produce the cutlery for Concorde. 40. CHARLES DICKENS Famous novelist Charles Dickens gave the first public performance of A Christmas Carol in Birmingham Town Hall in December 1853, 10 years after its publication. He performed it over three and a quarter hours in front of a crowd of 2,000 local people - taking only a 10-minute break for a quick swig of beef tea. It’s said a Victorian man, thought to be the ghost of Dickens himself, can still be seen sitting in the empty hall, in the gallery or strolling along the corridors.

The figure was once approached by a member of staff only to vanish before their eyes. 41. ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE/SHERLOCK HOLMES Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, lived and worked in Aston for several months each year from 1879 to 1882. He was working as a pharmacy assistant in the breaks between his studies at Edinburgh University. Birmingham's Sherlock Street - where Doyle is said to have bought a violin - and the surname of Birmingham printer John Baskerville were obvious influences on his later literary works, with the first Sherlock Holmes story (A Study in Scarlet) published in 1886 and The Hound of the Baskervilles appearing in 1901. Doyle’s time here is commemorated by a blue plaque on the building on the site of his former home at 63, Aston Road North. 42. THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE The Reverend Wilbert Vere Awdry, creator of Thomas the Tank Engine, was a curate at King’s Norton, Birmingham, from 1940 to 1946.

While living here in 1943, he invented stories featuring trains - based on his experiences hearing the engines puffing along the railway line at Kings Norton - to entertain his son during a bout of measles. In 1945, Awdry wrote his first book featuring his locomotive characters, then he made a model train for his son and decided to call it Thomas. His son wanted to hear stories about Thomas, and these were published in his book Thomas the Tank Engine in 1946. More stories you might like: Most Read Most Recent Most Read Most Recent

Question: The largest municipal library in the UK and the largest regional library in Europe opened in 2013 in which town or city?
Answer: Birmingham